Students will be able to analyze data quantitatively and develop testable models of that data.

The ability to analyze data and to be able to run statistical analysis is an integral part of being a biologist. Coming into this program I was not sure how strong my analytical and statistical skills were, but I was going to give everything I had to improve in this area. One of the first classes that I took at Longwood was an introduction to statistics course. This course provided the basic knowledge in statistics that would help me in the lower levels of biology. The next course that really cemented and bolstered my abilities to analyze and utilize statistics was advanced statistics. This class expanded my knowledge and allowed me to learn new tests like an ANOVA.

The first biology class that I really remembered utilizing statistics in was the Introduction to Ecology and Evolution course (BIOL 251). In the laboratory portion of this course my group wanted to test the tunneling behavior of ants in different soils. In this project there was a variety of variables we had to keep track of including 90 ants, 9 ant farms, and 3 different substrates. This project was a group effort in keeping track of all the variables and keeping up with the ants weekly. This project was also the first project in my undergraduate years that I was able to run a statistical test on. What was found from a majority of the statistics that we ran was that there was no significance. This class really helped me understand the importance of statistical analysis and how impactful it can be in experiments.